Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Another assiduous pursuer of TV cameras, with whom Vidal had already begun an ongoing series of confrontational television entertainments, was also at the convention. An enthusiastic supporter of Goldwater’s conservative agenda, eager to become the foremost young spokesman for what he termed “the radical right,” William F. Buckley, Jr. had from an early age embraced political conservatism with the passion of a religious defender of the faith. The same age as Gore, he was born into a large Irish-American Catholic family whose patriarch had made and lost great sums in the oil business in the Southwest and in Mexico and had settled into insular self-sufficiency in Sharon, Connecticut. Ambitious both for the minds and souls of his progeny, Buckley, Sr., had sent them to study in France and England. The home atmosphere was relentlessly devout, the family’s pious and pre—Vatican II Catholic faith its overriding loyalty, the faith and the church transcendent realities. The Buckleys had no doubt that God and the devil existed in tangible ways, that the dominating structure of life was a cosmic conflict between the forces of good and evil, and that eventually their Catholic God would be victorious. For the young William Buckley secular politics was religious warfare in another form. The only politicians and policies meriting support were those whose values cohered with the Buckleys’ Catholic vision. Since the supreme enemy of the Church was godless Communism, the ideological and political conflict, in the light of which all else was secondary, was between Christian America, the bastion of the free world, and the atheistic Soviet Union, where freedom was enslaved.

  A bright, sinewy, argumentative mind, a gifted, acerbic debater with a talent for and a love of language, Buckley discovered his lifelong mission as an undergraduate at Yale: to translate his religious beliefs into political philosophy and practical advocacy. The right wing of the Republican Party was his natural home, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio his ideal. His two combative heros soon became the rather simple Joseph McCarthy and the complicated Whittaker Chambers. The enemies (actually, the forces of evil) were Communism, liberalism, unionism, humanism, atheism, the Democratic Party, and any and all movements that did not give highest priority to the forces of law and order. Anarchy and chaos needed to be rigorously suppressed. Buckley did not himself desire to be elected to political office. His talent was for advocacy, not administration or legislation. His vocation was to influence others, to heighten awareness, to serve as a spokesman, to gather like-minded colleagues into an articulate solidarity. An instinctive propagandist, he knew that evasive simplicity works well in public discourse. A talented sophist, he had the ability to use language to simplify complex issues and to complicate simple issues, as he chose. Nuance and shading hardly interested him, though he mastered a variety of rhetorical devices to create the impression that as a debater he paid his dues to intellectual subtlety. When he graduated from Yale in 1946, his intellectual and religious views were strongly in place. So too was his determination to fight God’s enemies as tenaciously as possible. In 1951 he published God and Man at Yale, a journalistic exposé of the degree to which Yale University had become a center of liberalism in literature and politics. In 1954, in McCarthy and His Enemies, he defended Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. In 1955 he founded the National Review, an expressive embodiment of its editor-owner’s radical conservatism. A tireless lecturer, eager to persuade and propagandize, by the early 1960s he was on his way to becoming a national figure.

  Vidal and Buckley met for the first time in New York in September 1962, on an Open End program in which Susskind pitted them against one another for the entire time. They were, from an even earlier date, natural enemies who gradually became aware of one another’s existence. In his mid-twenties Buckley had read The City and the Pillar and disapproved of it on moral grounds. For Buckley, homosexual acts were sinful, those who performed them inevitably to be slightly if not harshly identified mainly by this deep perversion. When Gore and Buckley agreed in late 1961, at the request of the Associated Press, to debate in print the “liberal” versus the “conservative” position, their names were publicly juxtaposed for the first time. In preparation for his article Vidal got from a friend at Life information from its files on Buckley. In his column Buckley argued the conservative view that liberalism was an intellectually bankrupt political philosophy responsible for most of the ills of the twentieth century. Somehow liberalism was to be blamed for both Hitler and Stalin. Vidal argued that the real conflict was between conservatives, like John Kennedy, and reactionaries, like Barry Goldwater. The reactionaries, who had strong reservations about majority rule, feared democracy. To Buckley and his associates Vidal seemed a dishonest fanatic of the extreme Left and almost certainly a homosexual; they believed homosexuality to be an illness. In mid-January 1962, on one of his frequent appearances on the Jack Paar Tonight show, Vidal referred in passing to a recent National Review statement harshly critical of Pope John XXIII’s liberal social positions. The Review had called the Pope’s recent encyclical “a venture in triviality.” The Pope supported aid to underdeveloped countries, which Buckley opposed. He also seemed insufficiently distressed about the Communist threat. To Buckley, the enemy was now within the gates. In a following issue Buckley reported to National Review readers that many American Catholics, disapproving of the encyclical, accepted the Church as “Mother,” not “Teacher.” Mainstream Catholics were incensed. From Vidal’s point of view Buckley’s attack on the Pope’s views emblemized the extremism of radical conservatism. Paar agreed. Either Paar’s office called Buckley and asked him if he would like to respond, as Buckley recalls, or Buckley called Paar and requested equal time, as Vidal recalls.

  Buckley’s first national television appearance the next week was a splendid success. Irregularly handsome, with a genius for distorting his facial features as if his skin were soft plastic and an ability to contort his figure into an infinite variety of slouches and stretches, he took to television with sly enthusiasm. The camera found him interesting if not fascinating. His face was often a highlight of the show. He knew intuitively that it was better to be a “character,” visibly if not eccentrically distinctive in voice and appearance, than to be ordinarily handsome or conventionally photogenic. Outspoken, witty, clever, aggressively and self-expressively abrasive, with a sense of humor that tended toward ironic repartee, sometimes ponderous with a touch of pretension, Buckley entertainingly fenced for about fifteen minutes with Paar and his colleague, Hugh Downs. His voice and mannerisms were both riveting and engagingly self-parodic. A television star was born. As a liberal Republican, Paar engaged Buckley in an effort to define words like “liberal” and “conservative.” Buckley defended McCarthy, advocated that America invade Cuba, and proposed that serious consideration be given to going to war with Communist China. In passing, Buckley accused President Truman of having called President Eisenhower anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. To Paar, Buckley’s positions were chillingly inhumane, as he soon told his audience. Harry Golden, the Southern Jewish humorist, who came on after Buckley had left, quipped that Buckley wanted to “repeal the twentieth century and also defeat Roosevelt for a second term.” The problem with Buckley, Paar told his audience, was that he did not like people. He certainly did not like Gore Vidal. As with so many of Buckley’s appearances in public debate, his appearance on the Paar show was prelude to more. Statements needed verification or amplification. Vidal returned to the Paar show to respond to Buckley. Buckley and Paar exchanged additional clarifications. Vidal bet Buckley, through Paar, that he could not prove his claim that Truman had called Eisenhower anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. Buckley provided his “proof,” a press report that Truman had referred to Eisenhower not being sensitive enough to Jewish and Catholic political concerns. In context it did not seem proof at all to Vidal or Paar. “Are you, on top of everything, a welcher?” Buckley responded. “I had assumed you would apologize for the distortions and untruths you spoke about my family and myself and the National Review. Very well, we’ll let that go. You are not that kind of man.”
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  By the time they appeared together in September 1962 on the Susskind show, the personal pot was boiling, at least from Buckley’s point of view. He was especially ill at ease about Vidal’s and other people’s references to his dogmatically Catholic, ultraconservative family background, with hints of dark views and unattractive prejudices. Rumors had surfaced that his father was anti-Semitic. One family incident apparently pained and worried him. In May 1944 three of his sisters, with two other adolescent girls, had desecrated the Reverend Frances James Cotter’s Epsicopalian church in Sharon. Apparently Buckley, Sr., had fulminated in his daughter’s presence against the minister’s wife, a real-estate agent, for selling a house in Sharon, a city known for its restrictive covenants, to a Jewish lawyer. The girls may have thought they were doing their father’s bidding, though, according to William, Jr., his father and mother were in South Carolina at the time of the incident. With sexually suggestive cartoons from The New Yorker and centerfold Vargas girls from Esquire, they smeared and decorated some of the church pews and prayer books. The outraged Cotters and other parishioners reported the hate incident to the police, who soon, tipped off by a Buckley employee, had incontrovertible proof that the daughters had done the deed. William, Jr., himself was not involved. He was at the time at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Humiliated, perhaps ashamed, even penitent, the young Buckley girls were lightly punished by the local court. Buckley, Sr., severely admonished his daughters for the shame they had brought on the family. Soon the court record was moved from Sharon to Hartford. Whatever Buckley, Sr.’s, view on Jews and his impact on his children, the family was eager to put the incident behind them. Later, William Buckley denied that the incident had anything to do with anti-Semitism at all. It “was utterly unrelated to any real estate transaction in which the rector’s wife engaged.” The record suggests otherwise. Also, having lived companionably for years with the nearby Episcopal church and the Cotter family, why would the young ladies suddenly have decided at this time that the church deserved to be desecrated? Devoted to his sisters, William Buckley, Jr., hoped, for their sake as well as his own, that the incident would receive as little publicity as possible in the future.

  However, to his distress, he learned in March 1959 that the actress Jayne Meadows, the daughter of Reverend Frances James Meadows Cotter, who had been a witness to some of the events of 1944, had at a television studio “regaled” CBS reporter Mike Wallace with an account of the incident. Like her husband, Steve Allen, Jayne Meadows abhorred Buckley’s radical conservatism. “Evidently the entire studio was your audience,” a pained and angry Buckley wrote to her. “Is it your intention to publicize the episode indefinitely? Or is there a point, say on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its happening, when you will feel that the story of an evening’s aberration by three of your childhood friends has earned retirement from an active role in your repertory? Do you, in recounting the story, remark the fact that my three sisters, all of whom you knew well, had distinguished careers in school and college, untouched by scandal of any sort; and that not a man or woman who has ever known them, then or now, has ever imputed to any of them a trace of malice or bias?” With a talent for taking other people’s rhetorical simplifications and shorthand attacks with serious literalness, he was aggressively self-defensive about his family. Perhaps the Sharon incident had made him especially sensitive about what he considered personal attacks, and less than sharp in drawing the line between political and personal rhetoric. (When in September 1964, on a radio talk show, he allowed his audience to think he believed that American Jews were in general historically prone to be sympathetic to Communism, he gave those aware of the Sharon incident further reason to think him at a minimum insensitive to Jewish concerns and, worse, prone to making racial generalizations.) At the same time the National Review was becoming notorious for biting, brutal, often painfully insulting headlines and editorials many readers thought racist. Either there was a moral blind spot or a self-indulgent fascination with the language of exaggeration. Also, it had begun to be clear to those who disagreed with Buckley that he considered threats to sue for libel an appropriate extension of open debate. In October 1961 he had implied to the publisher of the New York Times that he might sue the newspaper for libel, a threat he made against numbers of opponents in the late fifties and now in the sixties as well, if the Times did not stop misrepresenting the National Review. “Your reporter wrote as though it were the organ of a Nazi-like movement which included Lincoln Rockwell and the California anti-semites; now you suggest it is the right-wing counterpart of Communism.” Whether or not the Times reporter was in any way culpable, Buckley characteristically counterattacked aggressively. His own rhetorical simplifications he avidly defended as incontrovertibly true. As a television entertainer he was deadly serious, and potentially lethal.

  Fortunately, Vidal’s and Buckley’s fireworks during two hours on the Susskind show focused on public issues, not personal matters. The TV critic for the New York Herald Tribune, Jack Iams, thought it “one of the most stimulating programs ever offered by Open End … an intellectual free-for-all that must have left both participants nursing their lumps together. Aside from the mental gymnastics … it was the suavity and polish of their respective performances that made the program a consistently fascinating one.” It was Buckley, though, who was the surprise. Whereas the reviewer had expected Vidal to be excellent, the “virtuosity that Buckley brought to his role, however infuriating it may have been at times, was truly remarkable. The supercilious manner in which Buckley displayed his vast erudition, the flashes of wit and velvety insults that were sprinkled throughout his remarks, reminded me of Noël Coward acting in one of his own plays. Buckley even looked a little like Noël Coward when he delivered a line like, ‘I wish you wouldn’t sound so fatigued when confronted by historical facts.” Whatever the innuendo of the Noël Coward comparison, which caught an aspect of Buckley’s manner that further complicated the Vidal-Buckley relationship, the reviewer apparently intended it as a compliment. In San Francisco in July 1964 Vidal and Susskind took on Buckley again. The focus was on the Republican Party convention and its candidates. That Lyndon Johnson would be the Democratic nominee was a foregone conclusion. What to do about the Vietnam War was one of the dominant issues. Buckley, like Goldwater, favored harsh escalation. Both combatants kept the gloves of civility on. The reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle had the feeling that Buckley, whose “facial expressions are unequalled by anyone in show business with the possible exception of Martha Raye,” and Vidal “were acting—like professional wrestlers—according to a rehearsal plan.” Another observer commented that it seemed “Susskind was a zookeeper trying to prevent two hissing adders from killing each other. But the hissing was always wreathed in benign smiles.” When Vidal claimed that Buckley’s efforts to provide Goldwater with an acceptance speech had been summarily turned down, Buckley’s hiss intensified. He felt it was an unfactual attempt to humiliate him. “For the record,” Vidal wrote to a Buckley supporter after the convention, Goldwater’s press secretary “told Douglas Kiker, Norman Mailer and me that B. had telephoned him ‘ten times’ the day of the nomination and that he had ‘picked up the phone once,’ and that when B. ‘had sent some stuff over I took it in to the Senator and he said ‘I don’t want to read this.’ After the show, Buckley protested to Nellor [Goldwater’s press secretary] who wrote him a letter, denying he had said what the people had heard him say…. In any event, for me to suggest that there might be a rift between Buckley and Goldwater is to help Goldwater tremendously. So loyal partisans should be pleased.” Buckley, who disputed Vidal’s account but never challenged his witnesses, was bitterly angry.

  Amid a varied, busy schedule, politics partly preoccupied Gore for the rest of the year, though Lyndon Johnson’s defeat of Goldwater in November diminished for the time being his concern that Buckley and his conservative cohorts were about to take over America. Before returning from the West Coast after the San Francisco convention,
he spent some weeks in Hollywood, having responded to the pressure, especially increased by his tax liabilities, to do some well-paid hackwork for MGM. He had in fact over the past year been trying unsuccessfully to sell a movie script of his own, a political satire called O Say Can You See. British producer Tony Richardson liked the script but could not make a commitment. Back at Edgewater in September, Gore had his usual social rounds, while Howard ran the house and attended to the New York brownstone. Since Gore did not have the equivalent of Ed Cheever’s gym available at Edgewater, he bought an expensive exercise machine that sent an electric current through the muscles and promised to reshape them more handsomely. Gore, Eleanor Rovere recalled, finally realized that it was hopeless and gave the machine to her. Ordinary exercise seemed more effective, and he did his best to establish a daily routine. “Gore was very vain,” Eleanor thought, “and hated to get fat. He told Johnny Carson one night on television, ‘As you can see, I’ve been on the Orson Welles diet.’” He had the blessing (and the occasional disadvantage) of seeming dazzlingly handsome, and often glamorous, an Apollonian figure to some, to others too attractive not to be suspected of something. Of what? Of being too talented. Of being too handsome. Of being too well born and at ease. Of being too ambitious. Of being a collection of qualities that had to have some character flaw at their hidden (or not too hidden) center, perhaps arrogance, or vanity, or some punishable vice.